Ben Gummer: Bashar al-Assad is a very lucky man. Were we having this debate in 2002, following an attack on 21 August and the successful
	interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, it might have focused a little more on the maintenance of international humanitarian law and on our alarm at the use of chemical weapons next to a NATO ally, Israel, which we have a unique duty to protect. The debate might also have focused a little more on our need to protect innocent civilians in the first use of chemical weapons in a battlefield in the 21st century—weapons not used even by Hitler in the second world war.
	Assad is lucky that we are having this debate not in 2002, but in 2013. The year 2003, which so many have referred to, intervened. We must not beat around the bush—Tony Blair and his Administration were dishonest. The result has been the injury of our democracy to a degree not achieved by any other single action, I believe, in the 85 years since women gained full voting equality. Our decision now is being influenced by that failure in 2003.

Ben Gummer: One of the problems of this debate has been the number of counter-factuals; the Prime Minister has answered a variation of the hon. Gentleman’s.
	In this instance, most people agree that the full likelihood is that President Assad has bombed his own people. We are asked to draw lessons from the experience of 2003 as we come to a conclusion on this matter. One of the principal lessons is that we should expect our leaders to act with transparency, conviction, consistency and principle and to accommodate colleagues who have doubts and be responsive to their concerns. I do not think that President Obama, President Hollande or our own Prime Minister can be faulted on many of those points.
	However, a lesson is not an excuse to prevaricate with questions of increasing sophistry or to change one’s mind at the first whiff of political opportunity. It is not an excuse to come to the House with a view different from the one that might have been professed in private and public some days before.
	If we allow the ghost of Iraq to influence our decision in this important debate, we risk a double calamity. In not considering what we should, we risk not intervening when we should because we intervened when we should not have. The victims would include not only international humanitarian law, which without force is meaningless and a dead letter, and the Syrian people, who could be attacked with Assad knowing that he would get no response, but our own Parliament, which would have been shown to have lacked resolve and conviction when it knew what was right.